I heard that German bloggers should have a site notice with their real name and address. But I don’t want to publish my real name or address, and I don’t want to pay pay a few hundred or thousand € because I don’t have this site notice.

I haven’t posted for a while and I will not make any further posts before I have certainty about the legal position of this matter. Maybe I have to delete this blog.

Hello my friends!

Summertime has come to an end and autumn has arrived. Now it’s time to talk about how I have handled my summer goals #1, #2, #3 and #4 this year.

It didn’t get as well as I thought in the first place. My internship was more time-consuming as I had expected. Besides, I was a little bit sick all the time. But there’s no reason for big excuses. Let’s see how far I got in particular:

Learning the Cyrillic alphabet

I can read now the Cyrillic blockletters with difficulty. I started with cursive but I lost motivation during summer. Didn’t know how the tracks on the CDs match to the book and got frustrated.

Learn to write Sütterlin

This competition was a complete success. I have sometimes problems to write some capitals instinctively right, but I’m satisfied 😉

Improve Swedish to a B1-ish level

I didn’t use the teaching books, but I read daily in my books (bought two new ones) and on dn.se. I also wrote down 30 pages of “Bröderna Lejonhjärta” (The Brothers Lionheart) and translated words and phrases I didn’t know.

I’m maybe on a pretty low B1 level in reading, but I’m still struggling in speaking, writing and listening. I’m waiting for a course at my university which starts in February 2013

Learn HTML and CSS

I found nearly no time for it. I have only teached me a few fundamentals. I’ll give it a further try in autumn 😉

This offer has no language learning courses yet, but I think it’s a very useful tool to educate yourself in general.

The people of coursera.org describe themselves as a “social entrepreneurship company that partners with the top universities in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free.”

And that’s what they are. 😉 The courses were offered by over 30 well-known universities. For example:

– Princeton University

– Stanford University

– University of Melbourne

– University of Edinburgh

– Johns Hopins University…..and so on.

The courses are usually video-based lessons with downloadable pdfs or power point files and a (usual) workload from 2-10 hours per week for a period of ca. 5-12 weeks (depending on the course-structure). When you finish your course(s) successfully, you can get a certificate (as far as I know, you recieve it as pdf via e-mail). That’s why I would recommend to use your real name as user name, if you are interested in using this certificate for your resume or something like that.

The number and range of courses is pretty large (about 200). Let us just take a look on a few of the available categories:

– Biology and Life Science

– Business and Management

– Computer Science

– Food and Nutrition

– Mathematics

– Medicine

– Education

– Health and Society……….

It’s 100% free. You can take as many classes as you want. There’s also a community for every course, where you can communicate with other students. If you didn’t reach to finish a course, don’t be worry. The course will be offered again later on.

I think it’s just a matter of time before language-courses are also available.

I love this Russian version of Winnie Pooh from the late 1960s. Funnier and probably more honey-addicted than the Disney-Pooh – Винни Пух!

Watch with English subtitles:

Hello my friends.

Most people learn 1 or 2 foreign languages, because they need to know them for business or because of private reasons (or for school). But there are other ones who are downright obsessed with language learning. One of them is Alexander Arguelles. He was the first one of the so called hyperpolyglots that I discovered on the internet.

Alexander Arguelles counts 38 modern, old and ancient languages in which he is able to read at least 90% of all words (list from September 2011) on his homepage.

He is also pretty famous on the Youtube-community for his videos, especially the videos about the shadowing-technique and about the characteristics of different written languages.